A prize for one and a death sentence for another

While a woman president was being feted with a Nobel award, a murdered lesbian was simply receiving delayed justice

There is, says a Google distance calculator, 5429.93km between Cape Town and Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.

There is little to connect the two nations, besides sharing - as with many countries on this continent - a history of political upheaval.

But there is a fragile thread that winds itself across the continent between the two nations.

This thread binds two women - one a powerful politician and the other a dead lesbian - to a date.

Last Friday, as messages of congratulation dazzled their way across the globe to celebrate Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson's Nobel peace prize, the murderers of Zoliswa Nkonyana were found guilty in a Khayelitsha courtroom.

Sirleaf-Johnson, who had become Africa's first woman president in 2005 in what has been described as Liberia's most free elections ever and who faced her second election this week, had become only the second woman from the continent to win the prize.

Trained at Harvard as an economist, and a former finance minister in a country built by freed American slaves, the life of Sirleaf-Johnson is part of our modern history. Bits of her life are liberally spread across the internet.

But what do we know about Nkonyana, a dead poster girl for the atrocious ignorance of men whose masculinity was threatened by a woman who loves women?

Nkonyana had no awards in a cheap cabinet in Khayelitsha and was certainly never feted, while alive, as any kind of superstar.

She would have been 24 years old if she had not been murdered five years ago by a group of men who beat, stabbed, clubbed and kicked her to death a few metres from her home.

The only sensible explanation for the attack: Nkonyana had been openly living as a lesbian.

Over the five years since her case was brought to court, there were more than 40 postponements, the prosecution was accused of negligence for not ensuring that witnesses were present to give evidence and four of the accused managed to escape from their cells at Khayelitsha Magistrate's Court.

When judgment was finally handed down last Friday, the case was in its 67th month, and only four of the original nine accused were found guilty.

And so the day that links these two African women is a day of recognition - one for achievement and one for justice, however delayed.

What grates, though, is the inequality that starkly differentiates their lives: one's womanhood is prized and the other's earns her a death sentence. The one is the president of an African nation, the other the victim of African men's incomprehensible discrimination.

So who will honour Nkonyana, besides the various NGOs who followed the trial?

Afriforum would ululate - if they could do a proper African yodel - when they beat Julius Malema in the Equality Court.

The Young Communist League spits condemnation at Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu as if he is a mangy, unloved squatter-camp mongrel.

Mogoeng Mogoeng, our recently appointed chief justice, belongs to a church that offers to lead gays and lesbians out of their damned sexual orientation.

It was only organisations such as the Social Justice Network, the Treatment Action Campaign and gender NGOs that relentlessly kept this young woman's case alive.

When magistrate Raadiya Whaten sentenced her killers, there was no minister for women, children and persons with disabilities to applaud the fact that justice had finally arrived for Nkonyana.

Oh, but I forget, this minister would not be seen near a dead or living lesbian.

Minister Lulu Xingwana, while arts and culture custodian, had deemed lesbians to be immoral after viewing an exhibition by "them" which her department had sponsored last year.

Then she said: "Our mandate is to promote social cohesion and nation-building. I left the exhibition because it expressed the very opposite of this. It was immoral, offensive and going against nation-building."

Lesbians are obviously not her cup of tea or part of her current portfolio of managing the nation's minorities.

I'm not a lesbian, but I am a woman. I might never be subjected to a chauvinistic society's scorn, but Nkonyana was part of me. Her death makes a mockery of a beautiful constitution, while the delayed outcome of her trial indicts our criminal justice system.

And it negates our Bill of Rights, described in its preamble as the "cornerstone of democracy in SA. It enshrines the rights of all people in our country and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom."

There is, by the way, a second connection between the two women: Sirleaf-Johnson took office in 2006, the very year Nkonyana was murdered.

Five years after ascending to the highest office in Liberia, Sirleaf-Johnson was recognised with a Nobel prize. Nkonyana merely got justice - something that should never have been in dispute.